Magic Leap blows our mind with its incredible technology... that still doesn't f**king exist

I believe it does have 6 sensors, high-definition optics and amazing depth perception, coupled with the best CPU around right now, with at least 6 cores.

Your head.

Or.....

If I were them (and I'm not), I'd simply get a Windows Mixed Reality device, rebrand it, plug it into a cheap Chinese Windows tablet and go "here it is!".

I use the Dell Mixed Reality Device, the mixed reality being uhh, umm, just VR, but it's bloody awesome (and this is from someone who thought VR was a bit meh), obviously won't say it's better than the Vive/Rift because thems fightin words but it's pretty nice and would probably make an interesting article on The Reg, MS's first foray into the VR world with a pretty compelling product that isn't vapourware or hideously expensive and runs on lower end hardware.

Sitting on the fence

Come on El Reg, tell us what you really think. The article seemed somewhat ambivalent.

It's not just Abovitz who's too far in......

Some of the investor managers will hang for this as well, which means they'll stay stum and pray it turns around.

A few weeks ago Ortoz from Gadget Show was having fun messing around with some VR stuff in a trade show - conclusion was it's getting better and cheaper each time but still needs that killer app. No need for any MagicLeap

Despite all of that, you still think they're going to deliver a product? Interesting.

Hololens with lightfield simulation

If they can manage to deliver a simulated lightfield in real time using current GPU technology, it'll be better than Hololens and well worth using. That's a big IF for the real time simulated lightfield which would have to be generated and change with and also be composited with a real-time sampled, dynamically changing real environment. To make it less of a mess of huge, horrible 3d pixels/voxels bouncing about and not adjusting fast enough, they'd need to create a f*ckoff gaming pc of truly staggering graphics capability which would also have to fit into a very small fannypack. Sure it can happen sometime in the future, question is whether it's possible now. Maybe a solution which includes a huge bunch of custom cuda cores? nVidia do seem to be delivering 1080-like performance in a tiny form factor for laptops, so this isn't beyond the realms of possibility in terms of technology. That being said who's going to pay 10k to be an early adopter? Given the guy's previous 1.2 billion dollar robotic arm for surgeons track history (company sale price), This Magic Eye isn't pie in the sky and the Reg's take on this is too cynical.

Hyperbole aplenty

The last time I recall getting this amount of hype and superlatives was with the Segway. It was going to revolutionize walking or something, and be bigger than the Internet. And it too was delayed, to heighten the hype and drama.

And didn't it have some nickname too that played on the magicalness of it all, wasn't it Fred Astaire or Ginger Rogers type of "secret hype code name"?

come on, be fair...

They created a great virtual product. It's so good that thousands of investors think it's real! Then there is the money, 6 G$, that surely is real. Enough to warp space time and bend people's minds. Awesome!

Trip to Paris?

The level he's working at, Abovitz is up there with Victor Lustig, he sold the Eiffel Tower. Twice!

Lustig also sold a 'Money printing machine' clearly Abovitz has one.

Fawning Tech journalisim

All the mainstream media and most so called tech sites / blogs (excepting here) are fawning PR publishers. Look at all the articles on every new Apple iteration. Only the 7, 8 & X have had a hint of honesty and questioning.

They all want to believe SF writers are publishing blueprints for future tech. They are telling stories for fun & money, not futurologists. Most SF future tech is simply for texture or a maguffin. Often the 1% that's feasible actually already exists but just isn't economic. Amazingly some tech businesses seem to fall for this too, if they believe their own hype.

There are even entertainment sites and magazines pretending to be tech / science news.

I am sceptical of ANY tech, health or science amazing claim in the media (based on my own science, programming and engineering background). I can't remember one where I know the stuff well that was correct.

Even here a lot of nonsense is posted as news about LTE, 5G and mobile. A domain that I designed and evaluated stuff in for many years. It's lovely to see the growing realisation that AI, Machine Learning, Neural Networks, Deep Learning etc are nothing clever at all, just human curated data fed to human written programs that are as fragile as ever. "The Diamond Age" is flawed, but a good story about the illusions of AI.

Magic Leap One my arse.

I recognize a pair of Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses when I see them.

I can help with that $6Bn

I wouldn't even be greedy about it. $100k would suit me down to the ground. They wouldn't even notice, right?

mini-computer?

"The attached mini-computer will be much bigger than shown"

So PDP-11 sized, or maybe even VAX?

Showing my age here ;)

FFS

have we learned nothing since Moller ?

I want a flying car but this guy was a fraud

https://www.sec.gov/litigation/complaints/comp17987.htm

now we have more snake oil in the form of magic leap

s

Also doesn't answer the question - WHY

What is it that AR does that justifies walking around like a dork wearing this headset and colostomy bag?

I weep for the lost art of journalism

I have little expertise in anything apart from technology. I have to assume that technology reporting is indicative of the accuracy of the rest of a publication's reporting.

I'd have thought that the "fake news" meme being spewed by The Incarnation Of Satan On Earth would have stung more publications into being more precise.

Guess not.

Cicret

This has been done before: https://www.itbusiness.ca/news/the-cicret-is-out-this-futuristic-bracelet-doesnt-exist/52677

I got a call from a vendor...

They were trying to sell me their new AR/VR/MR/whatever system & gushed on & on & on about all it could do, all I'd be able to do with it, & "you won't believe your eyes!"

I asked him how that would be possible "given I'm totally blind?"

He swore at me & hung up.

I'm still waiting for an answer. =-D

Sixty-nine comments

So I need to add another one to remove this innuendo from my computer screen.

As to the article, hopeless vapourware company sells vapourware to morons. Is this news? No it's largely business as usual. Many years ago I worked with some colleagues and we bought out the company we worked for and worked with investors to raise the capital and make a success of the business. It went well. But the competitive bidding process opened our eyes to the presence of the sharks in the technology sector who have nothing to offer but make a good pitch for money on the back of nothing. We saw Theranos style companies with plausible but deeply flawed medical science and technology companies with unrealistic designs that, if you probed beneath the skin, needed some unobtainium to delivery what was promised.

So we had a bright idea, we understood tech *and* finance since we had succeeded in both fields. We could rent out our expertise to investors so that they could improve their hit rate and make decent profits and avoid throwing money away. Our mistake. No one cares.

What the investors want is a vehicle to increase their capital. It doesn't matter if that business works or not or if it has a future. As long as they know when to get out and can keep a lid on the bad news until they have sold up, that's all that they want.

April 8, 2016. Honestly.

Look up the video which Magic Leap caused to be placed on YouTube in June, 2016:

"Magic Leap Virtual Reality -- Behold The Future"

and this statement appears at 1:55 of the video's 2:35 duration:

"Shot directly through Magic Leap technology on April 8, 2016. No special effects or compositing were used in the creation of this video (except for this text.)"

The wording is explicit. What appears in the video are not simulations contrived "with" Magic Leap technology but an augmented reality viewed "through" that technology.

As the "technology" referred to is the Magic Leap goggles, then on April 8, 2016, a wearer of that device would have seen "through" the goggles' lenses exactly that which is chronicled in the video.

All that was required for that individual's visual experience to be widely shared was a camera to shoot "through" those goggles.

As that was the state-of-play on April 8, 2016, and as the company was so unambiguous in its use of language, one can only wonder why the goggles are still not on sale -- and why, if many thousands of people can see what an individual wearer would've seen all those months ago, there's any need for secrecy (and Non Disclosure Agreements) now?

Pictures of the product exist. Pictures of a wearer exist. That non-enhanced, non-manipulated video exists. The truth is out there. Honestly.

I guess.

I’ve been thinking this for ages

But the other big thing no-one seems to be noticing is that it looks like it’s only additive light. Like how a projector works, or making a photoshop layer set to screen, it can only add extra light to the scene. It can’t make any pixels darker. That’s why that demo on the telegraph is shot in a badly lit room.

And it’s why you can tell those previous demo videos were lies. Because they did create extra black. How would that possibly work? You can’t make things seem real or make virtual screens if you can’t make dark colours. You can’t use it outside. You can only use it in a dim room. So you may as well just get VR. Or VR with some cameras to make AR.

Tax tax tax

I assumed Magic Leap was just a tax write off for everyone from the Google, Bain Capital and Horowitz camps...

Time passes

“Time passes. Look. Time passes.

Come closer now.

Only you can see the houses sleeping in the streets in the slow deep salt and silent black, bandaged night.”

Oh hang on, didn't Magic Leap have a problem with scenes with black in them? Or wa that one of the others? Anyway...

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/05/29/magic_leap_ceo_rony_abovitz_steps_down/

"The controversial CEO of money-burning virtual reality startup Magic Leap has announced he’;s leaving the job.

Rony Abovitz posted the news on Thursday, recounting how the since the company “pivoted to focus on delivering a spatial computing platform for enterprise” he and the board have “agreed that now is the time to bring in a new CEO who can help us to commercialize our focused plan”.

Abovitz founded the company in 2011 and helped it to raise $2.6bn of investment, plenty of it won with breathtaking “demos” of the company’s VR tech that were actually just special effects videos.

[...]"